Tim Tebow And His Even Dirtier GQ Pictures

The Sideline Princess shoot was fine, but those aren’t even the naughtiest pictures of a Florida alum in GQ this month. The lurid full-page centerfold of a sweaty, shirtless Tim Tebow is positively filthy....and comes with drooling prose to match.

It won’t be a college football magazine preview this fall without a profile of God’s favorite warrior and this one does not disappoint. Talk about his parents Filipino orphanage? Check. Circumcision stories? Check? Home schooling? His mega-church? Check, Check. The disrespect from NFL scouts? Got it. Angry, defensive quotes from Urban Meyer? You betcha. Harlequin romance-level descriptions of Tebow’s Adonis-like physique. Boy howdy....

Tebow is six feet three and 245 pounds, all thick polygons and smooth flat planes and inescapable corn-fed handsomeness. He’s wearing a billowy white shirt and loose-fitting jeans that somehow only underscore the solidity of his bulk, like a tarpaulin draped over a concrete pylon. You can see why coaches have always wanted to deploy his body as a battering ram. ...

He looks smaller in person than on TV or on a stage. Something to do with the geometry of his body, the relentless blockiness; distance turns Tebow into a cartoon. Close-up he’s rounder, reassuringly 3-D, wearing a sea blue T-shirt and long ivory shorts. He grabs a hard-boiled egg from a bowl at the dining commons. With exquisite casualness, he tosses it back and forth from hand to hand without cracking the shell. ...

Tim Tebow moves; glides? drifts?-back to his seat, his plate heaped with three sausage patties, a syrup-drenched waffle, and five hard-boiled eggs. “Can I get you anything to drink?” he asks, and pours me a glass of orange juice. ...

His chin is stubbly. He smells strongly of deodorant, and his thick-lashed eyes are impressively serene, considering that a mere forty-five minutes ago, back in the Florida weight room, Tebow was grunting next to a painted slogan that read PAIN IS WEAKNESS LEAVING THE BODY, doing calf raises with a 300-pound offensive lineman sitting on his shoulders. (In the weight room, Tebow wore a blue spandex shirt with an orange flame crawling up the sleeve; everyone else was in gray.)

The author, Jason Fagone, doesn’t really get anything new out of Tebow, but then there’s nothing new to get. (Although Tebow did bus Jason’s dishes for him. Seriously.) The man is an open book. Did you know he was almost aborted? It was recommended by doctors because of complications during pregnancy, but his mother refused. I think that would leave a mark on a kid, but I don’t know if that totally explains his insane competitiveness. The point is that he’s not hiding anything and his Jesus Freak persona is not an act.

That’s what makes him such an attractive interview subject. Reporters who talk to him realize he’s not trying to pull one over on them—unlike every other athlete and coach they meet. So they love him, they love to write about him, and the missionary has his mission accomplished. The Word is out.

And if his naked pecs help accomplish that, then everyone wins, right?

DOES GOD HAVE A TIM TEBOW COMPLEX? [GQ]